baby although I can remember farther back than anyone else I know My first real memory is lying in my crib and looking up at a painted wooden lady with a pointy hat and four broomsticks flying around her The witch mobile had been left alongside me on that doorstep It kept me amused for hours My little hands and feet never tired of stretching up to try to touch it It was a wintry night and there was a storm outside I was awake just looking at my witch mobile dancing in the moonlight Sam the baby in the next crib started to snore babies snore an awful lot and make snuffly blocked-up-nose noises I looked at the pacifier stuffed in his mouth Every now and again he’d suck contentedly on it As I looked at Sam with the pacifier in his mouth I wanted that pacifier Oh how I wanted it I wanted it more than I’d wanted anything before 2
I don’t know how or what exactly happened but one moment I wanted the pacifier really really badly and the next moment I had it And I was sucking on it as hard as I could Even with Sam’s dribble all over it it was lovely It took my mind off hunger it took my mind off everything It made me start to feel happy and sleepy Of course Sam wasn’t exactly pleased to have lost the pacifier and he started screaming He wouldn’t shut up for a long time he was trying to tell Nurse Harrigan that his precious pacifier had been stolen but she didn’t understand I continued sucking happily and looked at my witch mobile The witch danced about in the moonlight and seemed to smile at me You’d have thought all the babies at Templeton Children’s Home would have been adopted 4
super fast and lots of them were but not me And not Sam either By the time we were five lots of people had wanted to adopt me because I was sweet and cute and lots of people had wanted to adopt Sam too but we didn’t want to be adopted by just anybody We wanted our Forever Families to be perfect and if that meant waiting a little bit longer than everyone else well then we’d wait None of the children were ever asked to go and live with someone they didn’t want to live with that wouldn’t have been fair One day we had a meeting in our den which was the old greenhouse at the back of the children’s home Sam had found it by accident when he was following a ladybug to see where it lived You had to go through a lot of stinging nettles and brambles to get to it and 5
